Duolingo: Content Creation Genuis?

One brand I follow on social media is Duolingo which is a language-learning app. I have used Duolingo on and off since high school. The brand has 810 thousand followers on X and 1.7 million followers on Instagram but has the most popularity on TikTok with 9.1 million followers.

Duolingo posts daily content that is simultaneously relevant to pop culture, entertaining, and educational. The brand is also comfortable with making fun of itself, as they are often the subject of memes, and taps into fan-created content. For example, there are a lot of memes and threads on social media about the Duolingo bird being "hostile" and "threatening" in its reminders to users to do their language lessons. The brand leaned into this and actually started making joke threats to users about completing their lessons and not losing their streaks on the platform. The brand is very successful when it comes to keeping up with internet trends. Duolingo has produced content related to the Barbie movie, the Mean Girls movie, the coquette aesthetic, and so many others. While Duolingo can be "unhinged," as some have described the brand's videos, they also share bite-sized language learning tips or interesting language facts aimed at getting people excited about learning. I can only imagine how busy the brand's social media team is. 

I find the brand's social media presence to be successful because it keeps users engaged with and talking about the brand. On TikTok, Duolingo's most popular videos have over 5 million likes and thousands of comments and shares. Even less popular content is still getting tens to hundreds of thousands of likes. On Instagram, the brand is also getting tens to hundreds of thousands of likes. This platform is likely one of the brand's less popular accounts because a lot of the content is not original to Instagram but rather reposted from TikTok. On X, the brand is successful in the amount of views it gets on its posts which are usually in the tens and hundreds of thousands. On this platform, the brand does less reposting of content in comparison to Instagram. Instead, they are engaging with user content and making original content around what is already happening on X. For example, Duolingo made a blog post about breaking up with someone in multiple languages and then reposted a user comment about a girl successfully dumping her boyfriend while finishing her Spanish lesson on the brand's app. 

Duolingo is very consistent in its ability to connect and engage users and fans in a way that I have not seen other language apps do. Apps like Babbel, Rosetta Stone, or Memrise do not have the same online presence as Duolingo and I do not believe they have the same user fan base. I believe that Duolingo has embodied the brand's commitment to making learning a language fun, exciting, and relevant. I highly doubt Babbel will teach me how to dump my partner. Duolingo saw an opportunity to market to and engage with more users with social media and capitalized on it. I do not see other brands doing what Duolingo does nor do I see them doing it as well. This may be because Duolingo is trying to cater to a younger user audience than other brands and believes that social media is the perfect platform to do so. The brand is very successful with its social media presence and campaigns and their content is something that I look forward to. I hope they continue to make content that is new, exciting, and makes me laugh - even if I forget to do my lessons sometimes.